Strangers met by chance can overturn habitual perspectives like tumbling stage panels
Evidence
In his 1933 essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, Gabriel Marcel provided a beautiful image that sums up Husserl’s view of what ‘alien’ encounters and international mingling can do for us. He wrote: I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set — what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 432
Categorization
- FICTION: The stage-set-tumbling image is a vivid literary metaphor for the defamiliarizing encounter — usable in fiction writing.
- CANDY: Marcel’s gust-of-wind stage metaphor for the stranger’s shock is a lovely quotable.
- DEFINE: The passage illustrates the phenomenology of the alien encounter — how it restructures near and far in one’s Lebenswelt.
- XREF: connects to: Entertaining the unknown depths of strangers counters the self-centered default setting. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 446
Broader Connections
- Entertaining the unknown depths of strangers counters the self-centered default setting.
#corroborates(0.82) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 446